EVENTS

Kinda sad to see all the effort put into a complete community volunteer-driven
event almost come to a standstill under the shadow of local communal politics
-- the Ayodhya verdict. Given that I missed last years even for personal
reasons, it seemed the Ayodhya verdict would be the roadblock this year.
Not.

Today, David Goodger kicked off the second
Pycon-India 2010 in Bangalore with his keynote speech while briefly
dwelling on his Indian 'adventure' -- no seat-belts in the autorickshaw!? The
auditorium hall echoed with laughter! Then it was a series of talks on python 2to3,
multicore programming, and many more talks .... The only irritating part during
one talk was one audience member interrupting the speaker to discuss the
topic/ask questions. Probably this resulted in the speaker not getting enough
time to finish his talk and demo the code completely. In a 30-min talk it would
be a lot nicer if the audience restricted their questions to the last few
minutes *after* the speaker completes the talk.

Another interesting talk was the screen scraping talk but I'll return to my
lazyshell under the pretext that the videos will probably be uploaded online in
a few days. Else, you could just attend the second day of pycon coz the nicest
part was good 'ol networking, old friends, meeting new ones and the barcamp
style corridor chats with people. Considering that the attendees were almost
500+, the inpycon
team really pulled off a community event quite successfully! Now I gotta
get some sleep if I need to make it for tomorrows event!

PyCon is back! With a rocking new website, a great location and more Python
hackers and luminaries under one roof than you could possibly shake a stick at.
We've also added an "Extreme" talk track this year - no introduction, no fluff
- only the pure technical meat!

PyCon 2011 will be held March 9th through the 17th, 2011 in Atlanta, Georgia.
(Home of some of the best southern food you can possibly find on Earth!) The
PyCon conference days will be March 11-13, preceded by two tutorial days (March
9-10), and followed by four days of development sprints (March 14-17).

PyCon 2011 is looking for proposals for the formal presentation tracks (this
includes "extreme talks"). A request for proposals for poster sessions and
tutorials will come separately.

Want to showcase your skills as a Python Hacker? Want to have hundreds of
people see your talk on the subject of your choice? Have some hot button issue
you think the community needs to address, or have some package, code or project
you simply love talking about? Want to launch your master plan to take over the
world with Python?

PyCon is your platform for getting the word out and teaching something new to
hundreds of people, face to face.

In the past, PyCon has had a broad range of presentations, from reports on
academic and commercial projects, tutorials on a broad range of subjects, and
case studies. All conference speakers are volunteers and come from a myriad of
backgrounds: some are new speakers, some have been speaking for years. Everyone
is welcome, so bring your passion and your code! We've had some incredible past
PyCons, and we're looking to you to help us top them!

Online proposal submission is open now! Proposals will be accepted
through November 10th, with acceptance notifications coming out by January
20th. To get started, please see: <http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/>

Please also note - registration for PyCon 2011 will also be capped at a maximum
of 1,500 delegates, including speakers. When registration opens (soon), you're
going to want to make sure you register early! Speakers with accepted talks
will have a guaranteed slot.

You can tweet,
dent and blog to spread the word
around and as the event draws near there will be calls for volunteers on the
mailing list, so
do pitch in. Usually I keep away from some of the Indian communities which are
riddled with a handful of rude jerks (whose favorite pass-time is flaming
another person), or arrogant control freaks and even cyber-stalkers !

I've never understood how a silent majority can allow a loud-mouthed
minority to overshadow all the good work they do. Beats comprehension!!

Well, thusfar, pycon-IN is one space I find different -- The event is
community driven and run by volunteers, mailing list discussions can get hot
and yet its open and transparent. The part I liked the most-- almost
everything, including finances are open and available to mailing list members
-- now THAT is very much unlike _some_ Indian event(s) with sekrit cabals
pulling the financial strings behind a "community" veneer. Its such a welcome
change that I try to pitch in when I can.

ATTENDANCE/REGISTRATION

Free, python beginners are welcome.
However, registration is required and you can register at mvit [dot]
eventbrite [dot] com. NOTE: Please register only if you are SURE
you'll be able to attend on both the days.

They have a limitation on the number of computers, so you should bring your
laptop if you can. For more information please email them at workshops [dot]
mvit [at] gmail [dot] com.

UPDATED Venue:
TenXperts office in Koramangala. On Hosur Main Road opposite Star Bazaar there
is a small cross road (attached to Robert Bosch's compound). TenXperts office
is on that road above Innovative Cars shop on the first floor.

Agenda: This meet will be focussed on taking
an existing floss project and working on it. Current suggestions are Pygments and a Python standard library module
for unit tests, but
feel free to suggest and/or work on your own choice of any floss'y python
project. If you are new to Python, you are most welcome to come and
learn. The idea is to get a local community along the lines of dojorio.org [English
translation].

It r0cked....an amazing
experience that got over even before it started (or so it seems) when time flew
past so quickly that each day at Atlanta now seems like a blurry dream.
Each day (moment?), there was an overflow of so many interesting things to
learn and absorb, before and after b'fast we had there were lightning talks and
at the end of the day too just before the keynote speech you have 5 minutes on
stage with your slides -- less likely that you get to lull the audience into
slumber in five minutes ;).

Besides, there were open
spaces, sprints
(Sunday evening onwards), and poster
sessions -- which was very interesting as it allows the participants to
talk to the presenter and exchange ideas, ask questions, clarify or even
suggest a new line of thought. Carl
had put up a poster session on Indic languages and there he was drawing
huge crowds in an already overcrowded hall. I met a professor and another news
broadcaster who were interested and shared their woes with devanagari script
and the poor unicode handling by free software in general.

There was tons of swag flowing around and the mandatory single negative
incident at the conference which Van handled very professionally. Onstage, he
apologised on behalf of the PSF to everyone present in the hall. I had attended
the keynotes and talks on Saturday and Sunday, attended the Chairmans party and
met a lot of folks but personally speaking, the closing keynote presentation on
20100221 by Antonio
Rodriguez kicked ass. He spoke about giving commit access to everyone
and he meant EVERYONE -- even folks from the marketing and sales team in his
startup got commit access. Wow, just WOW...HUGE amount of trust that

Ofcourse I did the usual tourist-y stuff: walked around the Olympic park ;
visited the Coke museum and tasted 64 flavors of coke ; Thomas, Yarko (who won
the community service award. Yay, congrats :)) and me (i even cracked my knee
for good measure) dined at Vegan soulfood, a chain of
US restaurants run by African Hebrews -- HIGHLY
recommended!!

BUT the most memorable and fun time was spent in the Georgia Aquarium-- its the
world's largest aquarium. The Beluga whales had just arrived and were
acclimatising. However, I got to touch sting-ray's and sharks (yeah i really
did), clicked tons of pics but the sea-otters...gosh, they
stole my heart We didnt know that they put on a show and honestly I
could have stood there all my life and fallen in love all over again at their
antics. Here is a video of
those cute animals high-fiving. I miss them

I am thrilled that I got to meet a lot of people I knew online and met even
more interestingly intelligent people too. The wonderful community that
surrounds and makes Pycon such a memorable experience deserves full marks.
Words are inadequate to describe an experience that is best experienced live
:) It simply
r0cked.

Note to all readers: Its been weeks since I blogged and
having started this entry roughly two weeks ago (20100219 21:43, precisely) but
thanks to Broadcomm's proprietary bcm43x drivers meant wifi issues and I wasted
a lot of time jumping hoops, and later downgraded the kernel version, time that
could have been used to listen to more talks or even blog and tweet about how
much fun pycon was! Broadcomm, dont be evil. I am less
inclined to modify the older writing so here are some "as is" thought bits
about my first pycon experience!!

I reached Atlanta after 4pm on thursday afternoon and Sylvia and me went
straight to the Chicago room to volunteer for bag-stuffing and there I was
rushing a guy ahead in line, little realising that it was CarlT who recognized me but I was so fixated
on the task at hand that I didnt notice whom i was talking to. Yikes, assigning
nicks to faces is not my strength! My nick generated some curiosity and left
many people wondering how to read it --i had entered it in devanagari script
but the glyphs didnt render it as it should " स्वक्ष " which
triggered a mini discussion of sorts on python and unicode handling.

Next, it was onto the swag T-Shirts and since Greg had just 2 PP templates
we had only two teams taking a go at it. Sylvia, me and Wei (and later various
volunteers) had a simple humanized-robo process to maximize folded shirts
output per minute. This drew tons of pycon gawkers and many onlookers wanted to
pitch in and have a go at folding t-shirts. Greg's wife and daughter came to
watch too. Our efforts were rewarded with yummy pizzas (yeah they had vegan
pizza too) and drinks. It was a lot of fun for my first day and its really
heart-warming to see icons who should be UP there, stand and work with you. The
simplicity and lack of pride is endearing.

Python is for Girls

20100219, Friday, (the first day of) the conference, was kicked off by
Van Lindberg and Steve Holden introducing the PSF and its
objectives and stressing on the PSF's focus on diversity. This was echoed by
GvR who started off his keynote for Pycon2010 wearing a t-shirt that had the
python logo and "python is for
girls", sent to him at Google by an anonymous person. Hmm...I am curious to
know who is the $AnonPerson@Google !!

GvR is one speaker that I enjoyed listening to, for the casual twitter-feed
keynote and yet informative speaking style sans slides. And no, GvR didnt wax
eloquent on the "state of CPython" although that was what was listed on the
guide. For someone of his stature, the lack of vanity in his community
interactions is endearing and if you are not already a part of this space,
you'd be inspired to want to chip in and do something. Another noteworthy
aspect, the organizers make no bones about pycon being a commercial event.
Unlike "some" private and commercial Indian events, there is no BS about
claiming to be a "floss" event with shady financial(s) that are not privy to
the community that makes the event, and neither is there a cabal that controls
and pulls strings from behind the scenes. Their honest and transparent
process is admirable, akin to other community conferences.

A round of snacks later it was over to many luminary speakers from the
Python community and the first talk I attended was "The Mighty Dictionary" by
Brandon Craig Rhodes and then I attended, Managing the world's oldest Django
project by James Bennett who explained why it was such a bad idea to have
different branches for each of your clients which will lead to an unwieldy and
incompatible codebase over a period of time. Deployment headaches with each
server-client network running its own software instance. Their solution was
"hosted service". He spoke about unit testing, its importance and how they used
spidering tools to test sites for all hosted apps. Saying "No" to
customizations and instead creating re-usable customized apps from some
requests. IIRC, his parting shot was "FLOSS, Internal code becomes external
dependency. Floss jettisons legacy code."

The vegan lunch was fabulous but more about the post-lunch sessions. They
were, Python 3: The Next Generation by Mr. Wesley j. chun ; Maximize your
program's laziness by Dr. David Q Mertz ; The Ring of Python - Holger Krekel.
The latter was a talk I simply loved so go and watch the videos which are
online and linked via the pycon website. This is another aspect of pycon that I
love --Sharing videos with those that could not attend pycon. They dont assume
the worst about people, as in, people will not attend the event if talks are
made available online (and hence the organizers wont make money when attendance
drops), not including other arrogant (if not) silly excuses that I have heard
from certain Indian events.

In 2010, attendance topped previous pycon's. It was announced that this year
diversity was at its peak with 113.3 women attendees. No, I am not sure
how 0.3% women attended pycon :). Danny
blogged and Guido tweeted, and wrote to the
list endorsing his support and thoughts on "diversity, people representing
other countries and minority groups". I did make it a point to thank him and
all the PSF member/organizers that I could remember for the PSF sponsorship,
enabling me to attend. GloriaW deserves a special mention and a BIG thankyou
for handling hyatt reservations for a bunch of women who were room sharing.

I also met Noufal and Satya (who was our room-share partner), who were also
sponsored by the PSF this year. Satya was telling us about her horrid
experience with the legendary US B1-visa process in India and the running
around she had to endure. Hmmm, why am i not surprised at the horrid experience
she had?! It was incredibly funny to hear that the officer asked her to speak
in python....doh!! My immigration officer was a hulk at 6'4" and the only
intimidating question he asked me was "So, is python like C language?" and
before I could speak he cuts in with "Never mind, I'd never understand what
you'd say. You are good to go."